The official name for Human Design Gate 6 is The Gate of Friction. But I call it The Peacemaker because its primary action is to use conflict as a doorway into inner peace.
About Human Design Gate 6 – Gene Key 6
Archetype Name: The Peacemaker
In Action: use conflict as a gateway into peace
Keywords: creating inner peace, conflict resolution, and emotional empowerment
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Official Gate Name: Friction
Human Design Definition: The fundamental design component of progress. The law that growth cannot exist without friction.
Core Theme: Fear of intimacy.
Bodygraph Center: Emotional Solar Plexus center and connects to the Sacral center via human design gate 59.
Tropical Sign: Virgo
(Want all of the correspondences and keynotes for the gates of your incarnation cross? The Human Design Map is for you.)
The Energy Spectrum of Human Design Gate 6
All energy in the Human Design chart exists on a spectrum of potential.
On the “positive” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 6 is the energy for using conflict as a doorway into inner peace. Gate 6 understands that individual emotional stability and clarity create stability and clarity in relationships. With this knowing, it takes full responsibility for its emotions before “confronting” others and doesn’t engage in needless confrontation.
On the “negative” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 6 is the energy for emotional volatility or reactivity that creates chaos in the outer world. Gate 6 can tend towards fighting for things that don’t matter or projecting unresolved emotions onto others. This all contributes to unnecessary conflict in relationships.
If you don’t like the results that the “negative” side of the spectrum is creating in your life, you can raise the frequency of Gate 6 with a number of boundaries, practices, and tools.
I cover the boundaries and practices for all four gates in your incarnation cross in the Human Design Map.
The most important thing to raise the frequency of gate 6 is to create plenty of time and space to reach emotional clarity before acting and take full responsibility for your emotions. This will help you to discern what needs to be communicated (or confronted) and what conflicts to simply let go of.
My personal contemplation of Human Design Gate 6 (Gene Key 6)
A while back, in my post about Human Design Gate 4 and forgiveness, I wrote about how contemplating the gates for these posts always arrives in such Divine timing. It is like it doesn’t matter that I’m updating the post a couple months before the upcoming sun transit. They land in divine timing, no matter when I’m doing the writing.
Gate 6 is one of the gates that my “due date” (to get the contemplation into my team for scheduling) comes at the perfect time.
One of my habits for these posts has been to review the material I have already written about the gate for the Human Design Map.
One of the things that stands out for the “high frequency” expression of Gate 6 is this:
Using your emotional clarity to know which conflicts are worth resolving and which ones aren’t.
It seems so resonant because I have gate 59, line 5, defined and hanging in my unconscious mars. I go into a bit more detail about mars in the gate 59 post but, in essence, our unconscious mars is one of our core relational wounds. And it eventually becomes our “vocation.”
(I talk about that more in depth about vocation in the “Human Design and Business Messaging” guide inside the Human Design Map portal. If you are a client, you can read that guide here.)
Gate 59 is all about vulnerability and breaking down walls to intimacy; it is the harmonic gate to gate 6 and together, they create the channel of mating.
For a long time, as I mentioned in the gate 59 post, my primary mode of operation has been to be more and more vulnerable in the hopes of breaking down walls. And I’ve done so to my detriment.
I’ve had countless relationships where vulnerability was not a two-way street, and, in some cases, my vulnerability was even used as a weapon against me.
I started to realize that, as Brene Brown says, all people hadn’t “earned the right” to my vulnerability. And I’ve made it a conscious practice to be more discerning about who, where, and why I am vulnerable with others.
What never dawned on me, though, until the original contemplation of gate, was the people who “earn the right” to my vulnerability are the people who have the capacity to take responsibility for their emotions.
They don’t make it a regular habit of blaming others for their inner state of being. They are able to work through relationships chaos caused by their unconscious projections. And, they don’t try to “force me” to hold space for them while they process their projections of me.
In other words, they are more actively embodied in the “high frequency” of gate 6 (or are at least attempting to be!).
When I look at the relationships where I thrive, this is true every single time, and any time it isn’t, the relationship goes south. I don’t stay in relationships with people who aren’t capable of emotional maturity on that level.
And it has taken me a long time to accept that about myself. My undefined solar plexus is no longer willing to be the sponge and savior of other people’s emotional baggage.
A while back, I ended a relationship with someone because of this very thing.
My spleen said NO to further contact and I finally listened. After decades, I walked away. I was no longer going to be the villain in their emotional drama.
Truth be told though, it was a hard decision, mentally, I was also holding onto the story that only horrible people end such prominent relationships. I’ve thought maybe I should be even more vulnerable and open. And I’ve questioned if I’m really the crazy one here or if I have a right to such strong boundaries.
But, now, a year has passed since the original writing of this post and it is even clearer that my spleen really did know. It was not good for my well-being to stay in that relationship. I don’t have the energy to maintain relationships with people who are in the “low frequency” of gate 6 and I am no longer willing to try and cultivate that energy.
It doesn’t mean they are “bad” people. They are just humans, too.
But, I don’t need to hang on, either. I’ve let the guilt trip go.
As is so often said in traditional Human Design, it isn’t personal – it’s mechanical.
Some conflicts are worth resolving. And others aren’t.
Good to know.
Now it’s your turn to contemplate Gate 6
When you stand in the truth that the gifts of gate 6 are always available to you (whether it’s defined in your chart or not)…
What patterns have you noticed in the conflicts you experience in relationships?
Do you depend on others to change before you can achieve emotional peace? How is that working for you?
What would taking full responsibility for your emotions look like in your relationships right now? And how might that heal conflicts?
I encourage you to take some time with these questions. Take them out into your world and let their answers reveal themselves to you. Intend for deeper levels of clarity about gate 6.
And, if you have gate 6 in your Human Design Incarnation Cross, be sure to check out the Human Design Map where I go super deep into each gate of your cross.